Sugar cane (Saccharum spp.) is a highly polyploid plant grown in different parts of the world from the tropics to the subtropics, and accounts for around 60% of the world's sugar. It is also one of the important cash crops in many developing/developed countries, with a high trade value. The importance of sugar cane has increased in recent years because cane is an important raw material for sugar industries and allied industries producing alcohol, acetic acid, butanol, paper, plywood, industrial enzymes and animal feed. Considering its importance in the agricultural industry, concerted efforts are being made for its improvement using biotechnological approaches.
The importance of sugar cane transformation is increasing as a means to introduce useful and improved traits into many cultivars of economical relevance for integrated crop management and biofuels applications. Some of the main traits to be improved by genetic engineering are: tolerances to viruses, insects, and fungus attacks, herbicide resistance, improvement of the fiber quality and the use of sugar cane plants as bioreactors.
The lack of a reproducible methodology for stable transformation of sugar cane has been an important obstacle to its genetic manipulation for many years. In 1992, Bower and Birch successfully recovered transgenic sugar cane plants from cell suspensions and embryogenic calli transformed by particle bombardment (Bower R and Birch R G The Plant J. 2(3):409-416 (1992)). Simultaneously, Arencibia et al Biotecnologia Aplicada 9, 156-65 (1992) developed a procedure for stable transformation of sugar cane by electroporation of meristematic tissue. Later, a method to produce transgenic sugar cane plants by intact cell electroporation was established by the same group (Arencibia et al. Plant Cell Reports 14, 305-9.1995). The development of herbicide-resistant plants containing the bar gene and derived from the commercial variety NCo 310 by biolistic transformation (Gallo-Meagher and Irvine Crop Sci 36:1367-1374 (1996) has been reported.